Choose life: The Potential for Reciprocal healing through the arts

Abstract

This chapter offers narratives of the authors’ own experience and ruminations on the power of arts-based engagement to promote healing. Our intention is to respond to colonization, historical trauma and the ongoing suffering present in neo-colonial societies. We assert that both the “colonized” and the “colonizers” are in need of healing and social change. One way that healing can be effected, or at least initiated, is through the arts. We tell our own stories in support of this argument. Our offering is one of embodied and emplaced personal experience and personal connections with each other and with others across time and space. We link our stories with a growing international literature on intergenerational trauma and healing and community based arts projects we have been involved with in the United States, Aotearoa, and Australia.